Power-Amplifiers Luxman B-1000F

The B-1000F was developed as the 80th-anniversary flagship product for the venerable Japanese manufacturer. Fifteen years of planning and development went into the design, and no detail was considered too minor for scrutiny by Luxman's director of research and development, Youichi Hashimoto.

 

 

The meticulous attention to detail starts with the B-1000f's transformer, which is wound with a 2mm-thick copper band, insulated with paper and hand-hammered around the core. A single craftsman builds all transformers for this model, finishing only three per week. The B-1000F also employs Luxman's proprietary Only Distortion Negative Feedback (ODNF) topology, which isolates noise and distortion from the music signal at the output, "sparingly applying negative feedback to suppress them."

 

The transformers sit on the B-1000F's vibration-isolation chassis base. Each section of the amp is isolated from the others by shielding and internal filtering. Circuit boards are laid out to avoid right angles in the traces—the Luxman engineers have their reasons for this, but what it really comes down to is that they prefer this layout's sound. Luxman claims that all of the passive components in the B-1000F's circuits are of the highest quality and are chosen for their sound, not just their specs. Bus bars of solid copper connect the transformers to other circuit components.

 

The rear panel provides balanced and unbalanced inputs and two speaker outputs that deliver 250 watts into 8Ω (the first 30W in class-A mode), 500W into 4Ω, 1000W into 2Ω, and 2000W into 1Ω (!). Frequency response is spec'd from DC to 150kHz (+0/-3dB) with harmonic distortion of only 0.0007% at 1kHz (balanced) and signal-to-noise ratio of 118dB (A weighted).